Catching up on my "articles to read list" today, I came upon this blog by Tom Espiner of ZDNet UK. Some comnputer users (and haters) are going to love this one ...
Microsoft: Vista feature designed to 'annoy users'
Posted on ZDNet News: Apr 11, 2008 6:38:00 PM
SAN FRANCISCO--A Microsoft manager has said that one of the security features in Vista was deliberately designed to "annoy users" to put pressure on third-party software makers to make their applications more secure.
David Cross, a product unit manager at Microsoft, was the group program manager in charge of designing User Account Control (UAC), which, when activated, requires people to run Vista in standard user mode rather than having administrator privileges, and offers a prompt if they try to install a program.
"The reason we put UAC into the (Vista) platform was to annoy users--I'm serious," said Cross, speaking at the RSA Conference here Thursday. "Most users had administrator privileges on previous Windows systems and most applications needed administrator privileges to install or run."
And they thought we wouldn't find out:)
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Comments: 14
Yes, there are other annoyances.
In fairness, there are a lot of nice things, too.
While this seems easier for some, the down side is that when administrator is "needed", a message pops up asking if it is ok to engage that role. Someone can click yes and its there. I have clients who wanted to leave this enabled, but who have installed all sorts of nasty things because they didn't know what they were clicking on.
I suppose this goes back to the WordPerfect tech who told the person to send back the computer because they were too dumb to have one ... but it seems users are sometimes being asked to know and do too much. IMHO